The twelve documents traced here span almost six centuries and three nations, but they tell a single story. It is the story of how a people came to govern themselves — and, just as importantly, how the people who governed them came to be governed by something beyond their own will.
The story begins, as most accounts of Anglo-American liberty must, on a meadow at Runnymede in the summer of 1215. King John of England had pressed his barons too far, and they had answered with arms. The charter they forced him to seal that June was not a declaration of universal rights. It was a list of grievances and remedies, a contract between a king and the men who held land of him. But buried in its sixty-three clauses was an idea that would prove inexhaustible: that even a king is bound by something. The law was not merely what the sovereign commanded; the sovereign himself stood under it. When Edward I confirmed the Great Charter in 1297 and entered it onto the statute roll, that idea passed permanently into English law, and from there into every legal tradition that descends from it.
For four centuries afterward, the story is mostly one of struggle to make the idea real. The English Crown grew stronger, then weaker, then stronger again. Charters were issued and ignored, reissued and amended. By the seventeenth century, when the Stuart kings tried to govern without Parliament, the old principle had to be vindicated all over again. The Petition of Right, presented to Charles I in 1628, did not invent new liberties. It reminded the king of old ones — that subjects could not be taxed without parliamentary consent, could not be imprisoned without cause, could not be subjected to martial law in their own homes. The Petition was Magna Carta speaking again, in the voice of a generation that had begun to suspect the king could not be trusted to remember.
Then in 1679, Parliament took a further step. The Habeas Corpus Act gave procedural force to a writ that had existed for centuries but had often been frustrated. From now on, a prisoner could demand to be brought before a court within strict time limits, and the cause of his imprisonment shown. A right is only as strong as the procedure that enforces it; the Habeas Corpus Act is what made the right against arbitrary detention something more than parchment.
A decade later, the Glorious Revolution drove a Catholic king from his throne and offered the crown to William and Mary on conditions. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 recorded those conditions. The king could no longer suspend laws, could no longer maintain a standing army in peacetime without consent, could no longer impose excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishments. Parliament must meet frequently and its members must speak freely. With this act, the long medieval struggle reached its English conclusion: sovereignty was not in the Crown alone, but in the King-in-Parliament, and the rights of the subject were the foundation on which the whole structure rested.
Meanwhile, an ocean away, settlers from that same English tradition had been working out something the mother country never quite had to face. In 1620, a small group of religious dissenters anchored off Cape Cod, far from the territory their charter authorized them to settle. They had no king nearby, no magistrate, no court. So they wrote one for themselves. The Mayflower Compact is a slim document — a single paragraph of substance — but in it, the forty-one signers covenanted to “combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” and to enact “such just and equal laws” as should be thought necessary for the common good. They did not appeal to a sovereign across the sea. They constituted themselves. The American argument for self-government did not begin in 1776; it began on the deck of a ship in November of 1620.
A century and a half later, when the colonies finally faced the question of separation from Britain, they reached for both inheritances at once — the English tradition of rights wrung from kings, and the American tradition of bodies politic constituted by their own members. In May 1776, in Williamsburg, George Mason set down sixteen articles for the new Commonwealth of Virginia. The Virginia Declaration of Rights begins with a sentence that would echo through every founding document that followed it: “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights.” Mason did not borrow that language from the English Bill of Rights. He wrote it himself, drawing on Locke and on a hundred years of colonial argument. Three weeks later, Thomas Jefferson, drawing on Mason in turn, wrote the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence is the hinge of the whole story. Until July 1776, every document in this collection had been concerned with limiting power within a society that already existed. The Declaration did something different. It dissolved one society and proposed another. It held the government of George III up against a standard — the consent of the governed — and found that government wanting. The list of grievances against the king occupies most of its length, but its philosophical core is in those famous opening sentences. Governments are instituted among men. Their powers are just only insofar as they derive from consent. When they cease to serve their purpose, the people who instituted them may alter or abolish them. This is no longer a charter wrung from a reluctant king. This is a people declaring that the king’s authority over them was always conditional, and the conditions have not been met.
What followed was the difficulty of constituting something new. The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781, were the Continental Congress’s first attempt. They held the new states together long enough to win the war and conclude the peace, but they proved too weak for the work of governing. Congress could not raise revenue, could not regulate commerce, could not enforce its own decisions. By the middle of the 1780s, it was clear that the experiment in continental confederation needed a new foundation.
The Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 was that foundation. Its framers were heirs to everything that had come before — to Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, to Habeas Corpus and the English Bill of Rights, to the Mayflower Compact, to Mason and Jefferson — but they were attempting something none of those documents had attempted. They were designing a government from scratch. They had to balance liberty and order, central power and local authority, the will of the majority and the rights of the minority. Their answer was a system of separated powers, of checks and balances, of representation refracted through different chambers and elections. The Constitution does not announce rights so much as build a structure in which rights can survive. It is a machine for governing, and like all machines it depends on the integrity of its parts.
But many of the Founders, and especially many of those who had drafted state declarations of rights, thought that structure alone was not enough. The Constitution went out to the states for ratification, and the price of ratification was a promise: that the new Congress would, as its first order of business, propose a bill of rights. James Madison kept that promise. The first ten amendments, ratified in 1791, gathered the protections that the English Bill of Rights had won, that George Mason had restated for Virginia, that Jefferson had implied in the Declaration, and made them part of the supreme law of the new nation. They are short, almost terse, but every line is the distillation of a long argument.
In the same season the American Bill of Rights was being drafted, an extraordinary thing was happening in Paris. The French National Constituent Assembly, in the first months of its revolution, set down its own declaration of rights — drafted by Lafayette in consultation with Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to France. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was a statement of universal principle, as the American Declaration had been, but its register was new: it claimed those rights not for Englishmen, not for Americans, but for man as such. Whatever happened to the French Revolution after August 1789 — and what happened was terrible — the Declaration itself took its place beside the American documents as a charter of the modern world. The idea that had begun on a meadow at Runnymede had crossed the Channel and the Atlantic and was now being claimed for humanity.
There is one more document, and it is in some ways the most surprising of all. By 1796, George Washington had served two terms as president. He had presided over the Constitutional Convention, commanded armies, set every precedent of the new office. He could have stayed. There was no constitutional limit yet on the number of terms a president could serve, and no one — not his rivals, not even his critics — doubted that he would have been re-elected if he had run. He chose to leave. His Farewell Address, published in a Philadelphia newspaper that September, explained why.
The address is long, and much of it is occupied with warnings — against sectional rivalry, against the spirit of party, against permanent foreign alliances. But the act of stepping down was itself the address’s most important argument. Every document in this collection up to that moment had been about taking power away from someone who already held it: from a king, from a Parliament, from a Crown. Washington did something none of those documents could do on their own. He demonstrated that a person who held lawful power could give it back.
That is the arc. From a charter that bound a king who could not be trusted, to a leader who voluntarily handed over an office he had been freely given. From the principle that even the sovereign stands under the law, to the principle that even the man who founded a nation steps down when his time is over. The documents in between are the work of making the journey possible — the painstaking construction of the legal, procedural, and constitutional machinery without which Washington’s gesture in 1796 would have been merely sentimental. With that machinery in place, the gesture became something else: the demonstration that the rule of law could actually rule even those who had created it.
That was the journey — made document by document, in the order set down here.